From sci.chem Mon Dec  9 16:53:12 1996
From: Alan \"Uncle Al\" Schwartz <uncleal0@ix.netcom.com>
Newsgroups: sci.chem

On the subject of lab accidents...

Michigan State University in the 1970s had an organic lab wherein conc. 
sulfuric acid, sodium bromide, and n-octanol were refluxed to produce 
n-octyl bromide.  The condenser was to be topped with a cork and a piece 
of glass tubing, the glass tubing to rubber tubing pointing into  a 
funnel hooked to an aspirtor to lead the HBr fumes down the sink in 
solution.

It was fashionable for the ladies to wear black hosiery over blue-white 
skin (Michigan winter).

A few nascent organikers in each lab used a Pasteur pipette skinny end in 
rather than a piece of 8 mm Pyrex, which had to be cut and then fire 
polished in a Bunsen flame.  A constriction invariably clogged. The 
pressure went up with the temperature, and a geyser of HBr and sulfuric 
acid mist vented as a ground glass joint separated.

The fog was all very quaint until the gals looked down.  Their nylons 
grew holes like Swiss cheese and peeled off their legs within minutes,


Then we had a  pair of grad students wherein the male was fond of popping 
his head into my lab and squirting the female object of his affections 
with a water wash bottle.  One day she was wearing an acetate blouse and 
he grabbed the acetone by mistake.  She mostly wore a bra after that.


Then we had a Stanford grad student with the initials VS who 

  1) washed a liter of acetyl chloride with cold aqueous bicarbonate in a 
sep funnel to get excess HCl out.

  2) measured the temperature of a glass drying oven with a mercury 
thermometer, which broke in the oven, giving his fellow labmates a day in 
the Health Center being tested for merucry poisoning.

  3) got pissed at the old clogging capillary feed needle on his GC chart 
and squeezed the plastic ink reservoir, popping the top with great vigor 
and showering everybody nearby with ink.

  4) worked up a large mercury amalgam reduction by shaking the whole 
reaction mixture in a three liter sep funnel, mercury and all.  After the 
first shake he was left holding only the stopcock and the stopper.  Back 
to the Health Center.

There was only one serious lab fire (Fire Department) during my four 
years.  It was caused by a physical chemist with delusions of synthesis, 
and after hours  The guys in the funny hats axed through the wall because 
the doors were locked.  It was just desserts for "calculate the pressure 
at which diamond and graphite are in equilibrium at 1550 C."

-- 
Alan "Uncle Al" Schwartz
UncleAl0@ix.netcom.com ("zero" before @)
http://www.ultra.net.au/~wisby/uncleal.htm
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